Yet another travel search engine refines its offering

Adioso, a travel search engine for “spontaneous and adventurous travellers”, is gearing up to roll-out the latest version of its offering.

The company, founded in Australia in 2008 by Fenn Bailey and Tom Howard, says it has worked hard to create a search product that supports spontaneous, adventurous and nomadic styles of travel.

The biggest new feature, according to Adioso, is its multi-airline route generator, that allows one “to save hundreds or thousands of dollars on cross-country or transcontinental trips by joining together flights from different low-cost airlines”. For example, Perth to Phuket offers a route consisting of two AirAsia flights for just AUD$180 one-way, $200 less than the cheapest direct flight on another airline. Or Ho Chi Minh City to Copenhagen will link flights from Jetstar, AirAsia and easyJet for USD$672 round trip, little over half the best fare from a traditional carrier.

Other features:

• Adioso version 3 continues to offer a natural-language search interface that supports broad or open-ended queries on both dates and destinations (such as Sydney to Overseas or London to Berlin late October).

• Still allows searches to be constrained by date or price (Auckland to International under $500).

• New feature - searches to continents or regions (such as Austin to Europe or Melbourne to South-east Asia).

• Enhanced support for place-name abbreviations (LA to NYC or SF to Vegas or NZ to KL).

It also also provides a routing engine that interconnects flights from low-cost airlines to allow budget-conscious travellers to identify the lowest-cost route between any two places domestically or internationally.

The company says its still very much in beta as a globally-focused product, and there are still some limitations.

“We only cover a selection of low-cost airlines in Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA. We’ll be increasing our airline and destination coverage as quickly as we can once we’re confident the new platform is performing well,” shared the company on its blog. “For now we’ve removed the ability to limit searches to airline, time of day (“morning”, “afternoon”, etc) and "weekend". Though these search options weren’t particularly widely-used, the people who used them really liked them, so we’ll be looking to reintroduce them once other higher priority features have been finished.”

Funding

According to a report filed by itnews.com.au, Melbourne travel start-up Adioso had $355,000 in angel funding. In January 2009, it won $15,000 in initial funding from US incubator Y Combinator, which Howard said was “intrigued by this spontaneous, adventurous style of travel we were describing”.

The start-up went on to attract $70,000 from US-based angel investors including lead Gmail developer Paul Buchheit, and an additional $270,000 from Australian sources in March 2010.